“Nectar from the bean of life,” as a friend from church calls it.
Like any fix, it can be a budget drain. Richard Bach makes this caffeinated wealth leak a cornerstone of his Automatic Millionaire program — called the Latte Factor™. Buying a cup of joe on the run every day translates directly to hundreds of dollars a year, and tens of thousands of dollars in missed-out compounded wealth over a few decades. Basically, you just drank your yacht.
Gee, thanks. Just what I wanted to hear.
OK, I'm not giving up coffee (or insert your favorite fix here). Since coffee is one of my favorite fixes, I'll talk about how to fulfill the fix for less.
I do like coffee out and about once in a while, so I buy the travel mugs from the store and use it to get a discount on the coffee. Sheetz has the best discount that I've run across — 20 ounces for 59 cents with their travel mug. They “pay for themselves” pretty quickly, but you're still paying a premium over brewing it yourself. It is a discount nonetheless, and it's better for the environment because you're not using the paper cups.
Selling coffee by the cup is lucrative. The first cup sold more than covers the cost for the entire pot, which probably cost about a quarter to brew. So why not brew it yourself and pass on the savings to you and your bank account?
Inexpensive, home-brewed coffee doesn't have to taste lousy. Buying whole bean doesn't need to be that much more expensive than the ground stuff, and if you pick up a small coffee grinder you can grind a pot's worth of beans right before you brew. Doing it this way ensures the freshest coffee because the grounds lose their flavor to evaporation faster than the whole beans do. Keeping the beans in the freezer also slows this evaporation. Filtering the water usually improves the taste of the coffee — a Pur filter on the tap gives you good water for about 10 cents a gallon.
Millstone beans are $7/pound in the grocery store, and the warehouses have beans cheaper than that — like around $5/pound. Our local discount grocery store sometimes has 36-ounce bags of Eight O'Clock brand beans in stock — rated higher than Starbucks by Consumer Reports — for $6. That's $2.67/pound. You may be able to do better for your buck if you have a roaster nearby.
A frugal way to add flavor to the coffee is to add some ground cinnamon to the coffee grounds — instant Snickerdoodle. Or some ground vanilla bean — instant French Vanilla.
Get a stainless steel thermos — these are more durable than glass ones — and you're all set!
